Restoring Reason and Civility in Public Spaces

In today’s polarized society, maintaining civil discourse is an ever increasing challenge.

We are a people on edge. Insignificant interactions can explode into furious arguments or anxious avoidance of the very issues we need to resolve.

Too many people are “losing it” and the question has become how to stay calm ourselves and calm those too agitated to discuss and solve problems with common sense and mutual respect.

Few are more impacted by our national volatility than frontline workers, the men and women who encounter and negotiate day to day with people requiring assistance, service or goods from public and private institutions.

Of course, we know that police, firefighters and EMTs routinely encounter enraged, panicked or irrational people.

Often overlooked are workers who, as a condition of employment, are expected to calm and placate individuals reacting with unreasonable anger or distress because of delay or denial of what they need.

Highly charged frontline encounters occur in countless settings: the complaint desk in big box stores, the sign-in desk in hospital emergency rooms and the waitng lines in motor vehicles offices.

It’s not just individual workers who suffer. So do coworkers, supervisors and bystanders.

Frontline workers are expected to remain calm and polite while trying, somehow, to defuse the fury or panic of dissatisfied people. When frontline workers fail to calm things down, they are often criticized for not handling things better. Rarely are frontline workers taught effective  strategies which tell them how to navigate these volatile situations.

The stress of navigating these encounters is exhausting and  demoralizing for frontline workers, dismaying for bystanders who witness such encounters, and confounding for supervisors.

Beginning in 2016, Rosemary Masters, J.D., L.C.S.W. helped launch a five-year study that was sponsored by New York City’s LaGuardia Community College’s pre-hospital training program and the Trauma Studies Division of the Institute for Contemporary Psychotherapy, also based in New York City.

The Project had two complementary objectives. We wanted to find out how seasoned emergency medical workers calm panicked, humiliated and/or enraged patients, their families, and bystanders in emergency medical situations. Equally important, how should those skills be taught to emergency workers who are at the beginning of their training?

Rosemary and the project team, made up of both EMT instructors and trauma informed psychotherapists, interviewed seasoned EMT’s and paramedics who had decades of field experience. The team asked them, “When you are trying to calm people who are really upset, what works and what doesn’t work?” The team posed similar questions to individuals who had been treated by first responders. “What were you feeling? What helped, what didn’t help you with those feelings”? The team observed instructors teaching in the classroom and talked to students about what it was like for them to interact with patients and families who seem terrified, humiliated or furious.

It turns out that reducing the agitation of terrified or angry people is not all that complicated, but, what’s really hard is remembering to use those skills while carrying the job’s primary goals. Efforts to address those twin challenges led the team to the formulate the eSCAPe Protocol.

An unexpected bonus of the Project was our realization that the skills of the eSCAPe protocol could be used in virtually any work setting where frontline workers must interact with people too upset to explain, listen or wait for what they need.

When our brains perceive a situation as life-endangering we can lose the capacity to reason, think and talk. Instead, our brains focus on raw survival. It doesn’t matter if, in reality, nothing terrible is going on right now. Folks whose brains are operating in survival mode will are too upset to find the words for what they need. These are the folks who shout demands and insults, who storm out the door and won’t wait for an explanation. These are the folks who call the organization and complain about bad service.

The science of neuropsychology tells us that to calm an angry or panicked person we must speak to the parts of the brain that perceive and react to danger. Logic doesn’t work. Sympathy alone isn’t enough. Reacting with contempt and disdain will blow the lid off someone who is already agitated. Instead, we must let parts of the brain that scan for danger know that things are safe enough to turn control back to the reasoning, thinking parts of their brain so that now they collaborate with the frontline worker wants to can give them the help they need.

A lot of our contemporary unrest, unreason and overall incivility has come about because our brains are misreading the world. Yes, things are uncertain, even potentially dangerous, but in the moment we are OK. The sales clerk who can’t give us what we need may be disappointing us but they are not about to kill us.

With modern neuroscience in mind, how do we calm the agitated brains of volatile people? What skills does it take to defuse that agitation? How do we teach these skills to frontline workers so they learn and remember to use those skills?